I’m still getting over tonight in Crawford. It was my most
memorable gig of the year. I hope I never get over it.
Imagine this scene: The leader of the free world is supposed to be
on vacation, chopping cedar and biking trails with Lance Armstrong.
Nice work if you can get it. But he can’t seem to enjoy his time off.
For the past two weeks, he’s been avoiding the country roads and
slinking in and out of his home in a chopper. All this to avoid
encountering his worst nightmare: the mother of a dead soldier.
Since August 6, when Cindy Sheehan began her vigil on Dubya’s
doorstep, the peace movement has reached a tipping point. The same
papers and networks that once cheered on the war are suddenly giving
her respectful coverage. And across America, people are dropping what
they’re doing, hopping in their cars and converging on Crawford. Last
night, what started out with a dozen people camping in a ditch had
ballooned to hundreds of activists of all ages. They sense that
something historic is happening. I think they’re right.
What’s happening is that it’s suddenly becoming respectable to
question what we’re doing in Iraq. And Cindy Sheehan and the Gold Star
Families for Peace deserve a lot of the credit for making it that way.
Dubya and Fox News can brush off old hippies, folksingers, even
ex-state department officials and CIA spooks. Folks like me are easy to
tar as malcontents. But Dubya can’t brush off a mother.
Especially a mother who doesn’t mince words, unlike politicians of
both major parties. Here’s a bit of Sheehan’s testimony to Congress
from June 16: “This aggression on Iraq was based on a lie of historic
proportions…As the result of this alleged lie, over 1700 brave young
Americans who were only trying to do their duties have come home in
flag draped coffins.
“Thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who were guilty only of the
crime of living in Iraq are dead; thousands of our young people will go
through the rest of their lives missing one or more limbs, and too many
will come home missing parts of their souls and humanity.
“I also believe that [her son] Casey and his buddies have been
killed to line the pockets of already wealthy people and to feed the
insatiable war machine that has always devoured our young. Casey died
saving his buddies and I know so many of our brave young soldiers died
doing the same thing: but he and his fellow members of the military
should never have been sent to Iraq.”
I didn’t get to meet Sheehan. She’s home in California for a few
days, where her mother is recovering from a stroke. But when I drove up
yesterday, on another of my adventures with Liz Carpenter, I played for
a bunch of other families who have lost children in Iraq. They were
easy to pick out, because they had reserved seats in the front row.
They were rocking out, and they sang with special gusto the word,
“Bushwhacked.” After we all sang “This Land is Your Land” to close,
they rewarded me with a standing ovation.
Liz followed me, with a speech that had the crowd in stitches. She
was in the White House during Vietnam. She knows what a quagmire looks
like. Liz was followed by the night’s star attraction. Yeah, I was an
opening act for Joan Baez.
It’s a relief Baez didn’t get to share a stage with Sheehan. I
would have had to wear shades to view that much moral authority
straight on. But she was frequently close to tears as she focused on
the families in the front row. When she sang them, “Where Have All the
Flowers Gone,” I felt like I was on the carnival ride where the floor
drops out and you’re hanging, suspended, on a spinning wall. Crawford
seemed like the center of the world, and the world seemed like it would
never be the same.
I came home to read that one of the Senate’s leading Republicans
wants us out of Iraq as fast as possible. “By any standard, when you
analyze 2 1/2 years in Iraq ...we're not winning,” said Chuck Hagel.
If our troops spend four more years there, “It would further
destabilize the Middle East, it would give Iran more influence, it
would hurt Israel, it would put our allies over there in Saudi Arabia
and Jordan in a terrible position. It won't be four years. We need to
be out."
The dark tower is beginning to crumble. I continue to stand by
what I wrote y’all two and a half years ago, the night this nightmare
began: “He may win his war in Iraq. But, bless his heart, we can count
on Dubya to screw up the aftermath…Most fundamentally, I agree with one
of his fellow Republicans that you can't fool all of the people all of
the time. Americans have an innate sense of decency and liberty.”
Silent majority, you need no longer be silent. This land was made
for you and me.